Books in Poetry series

Shange's lyrical poem is a tribute to the language of music and the magical, often mystical, rhythms that connect people. Music defines who we are as individuals, the places where we live, and how we exist within our communities. Music is life.Written in a syncopated style that has its own melody, the poem is perfectly married to twenty-one extraordinary and diverse works from Romare Bearden who once said, "I paint in the tradition of the blues."Here is a unique and visionary book that speaks, indeed sings, to both children and adults and is, at once, compelling, profond, and entertaining.

Over the space of centuries, the exploration and settlement of Brazil inspired a vast body of stories that sought to define the country. Its people, its landscapes and its history became the focus of an intense gaze that transmuted the image of Brazil into a fantasy landscape, a changeling world of mingled beauty and brutality, by turns quaint, hallucinatory and nightmarish. Cabra is an exploration of the imagination of Brazil and its the fever-dream. It is a mapping of the topography of myth itself, a search for the voice of history in the cracks of the colonial fa ade. Perhaps most of all, it is a search for the voices of the dispossessed, whose very identity is the tortured space of the middle passage, the in-between.

Humans express love in countless ways—through physical actions, emotional reactions, or heartfelt words. Capturing the perfect words to show a person’s love can be challenging, yet poets have done it for hundreds of years. What is love to a poet? Author Paula Johanson discusses eight poems and poets, with chapters on William Shakespeare, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, and five others. Accompanied by biographical information on the poet and end-of-chapter questions for further study, Johanson closely examines each poem, including detailed analysis of form, content, poetic technique, and theme, encouraging readers to develop the tools to understand and appreciate poetry.